The men’s Tour de France is arguably the highest-profile venue for cycling brands to show off their bikes. Naturally, these are some of the most expensive road bikes currently or soon to be available to riders. But have you ever wondered about the cheapest and the most expensive bike being ridden in the Tour? Is one actually better than the other?

Answering the first question is fairly straightforward and easy, while the second is significantly less so. But I have some ideas on how to least try to think about it.

Before we get into which bike is the cheapest, I have some bad news. The four least expensive bikes in this year’s race aren’t available here. The cheapest Tour bike we can purchase is the Canyon Aeroad which is being ridden by Team Alpecin-Deceuninck and Movistar for around R170 000. There are some discrepancies between the team version and what’s available for purchase, including Rotor cranks and DT Swiss wheels for consumers, while the team uses Dura-Ace cranks and wheels.

The actual cheapest bike in this year’s race is the Dare VSRu, being ridden by Team UNO-X. The Danish brand is currently not available here, but if it were, the price converted from Swedish krona would be a more reasonable R149 000. That’s with a full Dura-Ace groupset and DT Swiss ARC 1400 carbon wheels.

By contrast, the most expensive bike in this year’s race costs an eye-watering R375 000-odd. It’s the Colnago V4Rs ridden by UAE Team Emirates. Mind you, I’m doing some estimating here because the replica team bike from Colnago is somewhere in the neighbourhood of R345 000. The actual bikes used by the team’s riders have some really expensive weight weenie bits on them, like a Darimo seatpost, Carbon-Ti chainrings, and Carbon-Ti rotors. Plus, the as-yet-unreleased Enve one-piece handlebar, which I’m sure isn’t going to be cheap. This all adds up to a bike that’s more than twice as expensive as Team UNO-X’s Dare.

It should be obvious that the biggest performance differentiator between two bikes and two teams of riders is going to be the riders. But if you look at the prize money that each team won at this year’s Tour, well, it won’t surprise you to learn that UAE Team Emirates is pretty far ahead of UNO-X, with a tally of R8 843 990 (Second place on GC is worth R4-million alone…), versus UNO-X’s R817 694.

But what caught my eye is that UNO-X, despite riding the cheapest bike in the race, is far from being an underperforming team. In fact, out of the 22 teams in this year’s race, it is eighth on the prize money table as of the first rest day. Every team UNO-X is currently beating is riding a more expensive and arguably more “fancy” bike. Oh, and by the way, the team currently topping the prize money chart is Alpecin-Deceuninck, whose riders are on Canyon Aeroads that also retail for about R180 000 less than the Colnagos of UAE Team Emirates!

Now the reason this has been on my mind is that riders at all levels (including myself) have been conditioned to believe, to some extent, that the more money one spends on a bike, the better it is. But that’s only true to a certain point. It’s hard for me to say where that point is exactly, but if I had to guess, it’s probably once you hit the nice aluminium frame and a price point of around R35 000. Beyond that, the margins of performance only get smaller and smaller as the price increases and rider ability becomes the most dominant performance determining factor.

This is a long-winded way of saying that at the elite level, the difference between a R160 000 bike and a R360 000 one is much more negligible than it might seem.